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Back in the 1960s, the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss published Le cru et le cruit in which he argued, in the course of analyzing some South American myths, that people map the world in terms of binary oppositions, such as the raw (le cru) on the one hand and the cooked, or done (le cruit), on the other. Reification turns the raw into the natural and the cooked into the transformed, the manmade, the artificial.

Levi-Strauss is generally considered the father of Structuralism, that approach to the human sciences that attempts to reveal and critique the pairs of binary oppositions, and the systems of relations among those pairs, that underlie and inform observable human phenomena. Of course, there is no new thing under the sun, and Levi-Strauss drew upon the work of previous thinkers, including the linguists Roman Jakobson, who identified binary distinctive features in languages, and Ferdinad de Saussure, who drew a broad distinction between language in use (la parole) and language as an abstract system (la langue).

         The Structuralist approach and its successor Deconstruction (which was all about beginning from a position that rejects or turns on their heads traditional binary oppositions) led a couple generations of intellectuals down tortuous, increasingly loopy paths that took them further and further from the supposed objects of their study. Nonetheless, Levi-Strauss’s insight remains of value. People do tend to think in terms of inherited, unexamined binaries--male/female; white/black; warm/cold; good/evil; right/wrong; raw/cooked; etc., and identifying these binaries and subjecting them to criticism can be extremely revealing. An illuminating example of such a critique of inherited binary concepts can be found in Joan Roughgarten's Evolution's Rainbow, which demonstrates with abundant examples from the natural world the limitations of the male/female dichotomy. Some of the creatures with which we share the planet have no identifiable sex; many are hermaphroditic; some have more than two sexes; many change sex in response to environmental signals; all have multi-sex characteristics (mammary glands in men and androgens in women are a couple of examples) and so on.

    Which thought leads me to my blog subject for the day—the liberal/conservative distinction. Our politics in the United States has suffered terribly, I think, from increasing polarization, since the 1960s, along liberal/conservative lines. It seems grimly laughable now, given the events of the last eight years, to remember George W. Bush’s claims to be a “compassionate conservative,” but despite the let-down there (to put it mildly), I am increasingly convinced that our salvation lies in taking such seeming oxymorons seriously, for the liberal/conservative distinction does our political thought great disservice. It’s the wrong tool for the job, like trying to turn a small Phillips-head screw with a spatula.

    So, let me start by attempting to articulate, succinctly and as charitably as I can, what these two poles of our thinking are supposed to stand for.

    Conservatives are supposed to stand for limited government, fiscal restraint, conservation of traditional social and moral structures, the rule of law, protection of private property, and reliance on the unfettered invisible hand of free markets to spur innovation and hard work and so increase prosperity, on the theory that a rising tide lifts all boats.

    Defining liberalism is a bit more difficult. Traditionally, Liberals stood for maximization of individual liberty and protection of individual rights, and thus for limited government, the rule of law, and free markets. However, in our country and in our time, liberalism has become associated with support for government solutions to social ills and with tolerance for deviation from traditional social and moral structures.

    In practice, I think, both these terms, liberalism and conservativism, have become so debased as to have little meaning or relevance anymore except as epithets to be hurled by lords of discord posing as journalists. During the eight years of the Bush Administration, during which conservatives ran all three branches of the U.S. federal government, the national debt DOUBLED, from 5.3 trillion at the start of the first term to 11.6 trillion in October, 2008. And the single piece of domestic legislation that the out-going administration was proudest of, its No Child Left Behind Act, led to an unprecedented role for the federal government in the quotidian operations of our schools. So much for limited government and fiscal restraint. But long before the second Bush Administration, forces were at work in our economy to wring any sense from the meanings of these terms. Astonishing levels of merger and acquisitions activity, fueled by leveraged buyouts; free trade policy; deregulation; and a dramatic decline in the willingness of government to evoke anti-trust law have led to the emergence of massive corporations that are indistinguishable in the centralization of their governance from the Soviet Union during the era of Stalin, and this tendency was as encouraged during the Clinton administration as it was during the supposedly more conservative administrations before and after it. The supposedly liberal Clinton administration balanced the budget, pushed through welfare reform, gave us NAFTA and GATT, and stood aside to allow the consolidation of the financial industry that gave us the handful of failing institutions that we have today. A strong argument can be made that based on what the last few administrations have actually done, the terms liberal and conservative simply aren’t descriptive anymore.

    More important, I think, is the fact that our problems are too complex to be solved by programmatic solutions from the left or the right. And, of course, our –isms, as Sherwood Andersen showed long ago in his magnificent Winesburg, Ohio, make us grotesque. If the only tool you have is a hammer, wrote Maslow, you start treating everything as if it were a nail. In practice, today, both neoconservativism and neoliberalism show tendencies toward fascism and this is a terrible irony, for the one commonality, historically, of these two viewpoints was their recognition of the importance of preserving liberty.

    I would counsel self-described liberals and conservatives to check their hubris and to recognize the limitations on our abilities to construct optimal solutions to social ills. We all know the dangers of centralization and bureaucratization. However, recognition of these dangers does not mean that we should give up altogether attempts to address social ills by governmental means. Instead, I think, we would be well served to take more tentative, smaller-scale, and varied approaches, on the model of scientific experimentation, with accountability mechanisms that measure these experiments against agreed-upon objectives. One of those agreed-upon objectives would always be the maximization of individual liberty construed broadly to include guaranteed access to fundamental conditions antecedent to the exercise of liberty (access to the mechanisms for exercising freedom of speech and assembly, for example, and access to health care and education).

    During the recent election, the Republican Party candidates pretty freely threw the label socialist at Barack Obama, though Obama is certainly no socialist. The term socialism means“ownership of the means of production by the workers doing that production.” So, the term does not mean “having to do with big government programs” or “ownership of the means of production by a distant, oligarchical, all-powerful centralized government" as in the former Soviet Union. Increasingly, in this age of globalization, we’re seeing the means of production controlled by centralized authorities (boards and chief executive officers) who are far, far removed from understanding what happens on the “shop floor”—that is, who cannot possibly know or understand the business or businesses that they are in, and below these authorities in the “adminisphere,” one typically finds layers and layers of bureaucratic units, specialized fiefdoms headed by people whose job it is to coordinate with other fiefdoms and report to their superiors, and the owners of these fiefdoms have has their primary imperative not serving the stakeholders in their companies (the stockholders, the customers, the workers) but preserving and expanding their own fiefdoms. When one is far removed from the actual work being produced by the company, it’s easy enough to start seeing all that work simply as numbers on spreadsheets, to start thinking crazy thoughts like, “Gee, I could outsource this accounting or HR function to Mumbai and save a lot of money in the short term and collect bigger bonuses and retire early to my yacht.” But the long-term consequence of such action in our country has been that workers have lost all commitment to and concern for the companies for which they work. No one says, proudly, anymore, “I’m a GM worker. We make damned good cars.” And so quality and productivity suffer terribly, at the same time that C-level managers are finding astonishing opportunities for short-term looting of their firms.

    The smartest upper-level managers, these days, are recognizing that small is beautiful. They are creating small, self-governing, self-sufficient, cross-functional units, often competing ones, within their own companies, and they are empowering these units to act entrepreneurially. It is perfectly consistent with such moves to work toward worker ownership by means of compensation in the form of employee stock ownership plans and employee governance through election of (votes of confidence in) managers. Such a move might sound socialist in the sense that it transfers some ownership to workers, but it would have nothing at all in common with those horrific failed socialist-in-name-only experiments that occurred in the twentieth century in the Communist states. And, such a move would be perfectly consistent with free-markets, encouraging competition and innovation and initiative.

    It is instructive to note that of the 500 companies in the Standard and Poors 500 in 1957, only 72 existed fifty years later. Most of them succumbed to radical discontinuities to which they could not adapt. They were too dependent on something in their environments that was changing. So, they went extinct. Extinction of big, successful entities is the rule, not the exception. And the bigger they are, the harder they fall. Big fails.

    What’s true of businesses is also true of schools. The public school system in the United States has done amazing things—it has harnessed the potential of millions of people who otherwise might never have been able to make anything of themselves. It was because of the public school system that I, a boy from a small farm in Southern Kentucky, was able to learn enough to grow up to write books and work for publishers and foundations and management consulting groups and do a lot more than grub in the dirt for subsistence. But, our massive school system is not keeping up with the rate of technological and social change in the world. Look out at the world of work, and you’ll see that we need people who can perform health care services and install computer networks and design websites and so on, but our schools don’t teach kids how to do those things, and though the average worker these days has to retrain and retrain and retrain throughout his or her career, we still think of school as something that is done, once and for all, in the first twelve or sixteen years of life rather than as something that is ongoing. The biggest problem that we have in our educational system—the quality of the education received by our teachers—is barely addressed by so-called reform movements (because really addressing this problem would be really expensive). One could go on and on enumerating the problems. But again, a tentative, experimental, empirical approach would make sense. Let’s create lots and lots of experiments in educational methods and modalities and organizational structures, and let’s see what grows in these Petri dishes, instead of assuming that we have all the answers beforehand.

         I am convinced for a lot of reasons that early education should be about grounding in common cultural materials and attention to reading skills and foreign languages, with the addition of a lot of opportunity for play and socialization. I think that instruction should take place within specific, intensely immersive knowledge domains. I think that tutorials should be a key modality of instruction. I think that kids should walk away from a learning experience with new operations that they can carry out. I think that subject-area expertise should be a sine qua non for teacher selection. I also think that a lot of our math instruction should be delayed until young people have the cognitive equipment with which to reason abstractly—that kids would learn a LOT more if they learned it a LITTLE later. But don’t take my word on these matters, even though I can pile up reams of studies in front of you to support my claims. Instead, give me a school, let me try out these crazy ideas, and look at the results. If it works, copy it. If it doesn’t, let it die.

    Small is beautiful. Big governments. Big corporations. Big education. These don’t work well. But don’t put me in the neo-conservative camp because I believe these things. The neo-cons ran our government for the last eight years—the executive, both houses, and much of the judiciary—and they have given us the biggest, most intrusive government we’ve ever seen. I also happen to believe that access to education and health care and privacy should be fundamental rights, like our rights to free speech and assembly and due process. But these rights can be secured without creating monoliths in the public or private sectors. We can be pragmatic and take a scientific approach that is neither liberal nor conservative in any traditional sense. Perhaps we should simply stop using these terms because they are no longer useful or descriptive.

     Here's an example of possible experimentation in social policy: Unspoken by either candidate during the recent presidential election was the fact that we are facing a coming bill of 75 trillion dollars for promised entitlements (social security and Medicare). What if we gave people the opportunity to forego social security payments in exchange for living in gated, assisted-living communities built and staffed by young people working in a new Vista-like program? It would be cheaper and would meet a lot of need and would give young people something productive to do. And, it would be a terrible shame to reject such a proposal out of hand as "one of those big, socialist, government programs." Let’s not create a big, socialist government program to do this. Let’s try some experiments along these lines (AND OTHERS) and see how they work.